Add external collaborators working on website (triage role) in .asf.yml

[Ma77Ball]

Feature Summary

External collaborators working with the Apache Texera team that need to edit the website should be added to the triage role in .asf.yml (https://github.com/apache/infrastructure-asfyaml?tab=readme-ov-file#assigning-the-github-triage-role-to-external-collaborators)

Proposed Solution or Design

Add collaborators section in .asf.yml (described here: https://github.com/apache/infrastructure-asfyaml?tab=readme-ov-file#assigning-the-github-triage-role-to-external-collaborators)

Impact / Priority

(P3)Low – nice to have

Affected Area

Other

[Yicong-Huang]

Yes I aware of this option, and usually it is a good way to become a "triager" before officially become a "committer".

A few points, though:

1. Apache does not allow GitHub "Triage Access" explicitly. It only gives "Write Access" to committers.
2. The above workaround can only allow up to 10 external collaborators (see example Apache Iceberg yaml). Deciding who to support or not is also a procedure, i.e., contributors typically need to "earn" the role through a process.
3. This is now incubating for Apache project, so we should not only consider "students".

So I tend to not go with this temporary workaround, at least for this purpose. We could promote 1~2 good candidates to be granted as "triager role" to help out. We should have a way for all external contributors (none committers) to be able to "triage", such as assign issues, request reviews, etc., possibly through GitHub Actions and comments as commands. In this direction I am setting up some automations such as

• chore: Add issue triage workflow for label management #4060.

[chenlica]

@Ma77Ball Please share your thoughts so that we can make a decision.

[Ma77Ball]

It might make sense to add or remove the website developers to this role when they are not yet contributors. This is more of a nice-to-have than a necessity at the moment. The main benefit would be that people who aren’t contributors yet could help manage the website’s GitHub page a bit or assign reviewers without having to mention them manually in the PR description with an @.

[Yicong-Huang]

TL;DR: Requesting reviews through comments is the standard practice in Apache projects. Sorry about that.

For requesting reviews and assigning issues, Apache projects use a comment-based mechanism by default. This is consistent across both JIRA and GitHub. Non-committers cannot be assigned; they can only comment to claim an issue or request a review. The above workflows are automation tools to ease this process.

I am not fully getting the point for website developers to have access to this repo. I thought the apache website source code is managed by apache/incubator-texera-site? We can manage the access to that repo in dependently, which is out of the scope of this repo.

[Ma77Ball]

Thanks for the clarification! That all makes sense. Given the Apache workflow and the limitations around GitHub's triage role, it's completely fine if we don't add the triage role for this purpose. This feature was more of a nice-to-have, as there are a few reasons I thought having triage access could be beneficial:

1. The website will likely have more frequent, minor edits (content tweaks, documentation fixes, layout changes). Allowing trusted contributors to help organize PRs can reduce the burden on committers.
2. The ability to self-assign or manage issues makes it easier for website maintainers to indicate what they're actively working on, reducing duplicate efforts.

These would be conveniences rather than necessities, and access to the website repo can also be managed independently, so I'm totally fine with leaving things as they are, especially if this is the standard practice amongst Apache projects.

[chenlica]

@Yicong-Huang @Ma77Ball If no action is needed, can we close this issue?

[Yicong-Huang]

Closed for now. Will raise other proposals. We want to make developers life easier for sure.